Scientists Discover Plants Have “Brains” That Determine When They Grow

Plants have a long and unexpected evolutionary lineage.

Did you know that land plants evolved 450 million years ago? Or that sharks are older than trees?

Flowers didn’t appear until the Cretaceous Period (around 66 million years ago) and grass only starting sprouting 40 million years ago!

In that time, plants have evolved some incredible traits, and as a new study led by the University of Birmingham reveals, a “brain” may also be one of them.

Not one in the same sense that you, I and animals have but more a series of cells acting as a command center. If you read our article Understanding What Makes Plants Happy, you’ll see that plants enjoy and grow in environments which factor in best conditions. Much like little humans who need a safe and loving environment to grow.

Found within plant embryos, these cells have been found to make key decisions in terms of the plant’s life cycle. Most significantly, they trigger germination, something that needs to be timed perfectly in order to avoid appearing too early in a frigid winter or too late in a warm summer populated by too much competing for flora.

The command center is split between two types of cell – one that encourages seeds to remain dormant and one that initiates germination. Using hormones to communicate, much in the way that nerve cells within brains do, the cells assess the environmental conditions around them and decide when it’s best to begin the birthing process.

This is incredibly difficult to observe in real-time in plant embryos. So, they relied on mathematical modeling to predict how biological processes will unfold in the most common scenarios.

Coming to the conclusion that this hormonal exchange was controlling the germination process, the team then used a genetically modified version of the thale cress plant to make sure the cells were more prominently interconnected.

This way, the movement of hormones between the cells showed up more – and ultimately, the team spotted the command center cells talking to each other in this way.

Anthers of thale cress, as seen through a fluorescence micrograph. Heiti Paves/Shutterstock “Our work reveals a crucial separation between the components within a plant decision-making center,” lead author Professor George Bassel said in a statement.

So why have two types of cell rather than one?

Well according to the team, this means that they can have a different “opinion” of the environmental conditions around them – and germination only occurs when a consensus has been arrived at. “It’s like the difference between reading one critic’s review of a film four times over, or amalgamating four different critics’ views before deciding to go to the cinema,” Dr Iain Johnston, a bio-mathematician involved in the study, added.

So plants may not technically have brains, but they sure act like they do. Think about them apples, next time you are in the garden.